The Goals and Promise of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act

The primary goal of the SarbanesOxley Act was to fix auditing of U.S. public companies, consistent with its full, official name: the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act of 2002. By consensus, auditing had been working poorly, and increasingly so. The most important, and most promising, part of SarbanesOxley was the creation of a unique, quasi-public institution to oversee and regulate auditing, the Public Company...